Mobility is a key factor in urban development. Mobility is a fact of daily life, and this is impossible to understand without considering the millions of journeys made on foot, by bike, on public transport or in private vehicles, in addition to journeys by commercial vehicles.

For the citizens of Barcelona, mobility is becoming increasingly efficient and healthier, and this is contributing to improving the city's environmental quality and making public areas safer and more comfortable.

The Mobility Pact is a space for participation and dialogue with a participatory forum made up of local government and a wide range of the city's associations and institutions, for the purpose of building a concensus-based mobility model.

How to make tourist mobility more sustainable and compatible

Mobility. Plans are being considered on how to manage tourist mobility in the city and integrate it into the overall urban planning model.

Tourist mobility causes saturation in the busiest areas of the city and undermines the idea behind the current pricing system for public transport, which rewards regular users. Work is being done to address this via a municipal government measure which should integrate tourists’ needs into mobility management and planning in the city, making it more compatible with everyday life, with visitors paying the real cost of their journeys.

On average, 154,000 visitors make journeys around the city, most of them on foot (45%) and on the metro (33%), and to a lesser extent, by taxi or on the tourist bus (15%). “The pattern is similar to the habitual use made by city residents”, explained the Councillor for Mobility, Mercedes Vidal. This poses a challenge when it comes to counting all sorts of users equally and correctly.

Most visitors make intensive use of T-10 travel cards, which are subsidised to ensure public transport at a fair price for regular users. Because of this, one of the priorities for the measure is to work with different sectors on a review of pricing policy so that visitors pay the real cost of mobility.

The strategy for tourist mobility also contemplates the design of solutions to congestion problems on the public transport network, boosting the quality of the taxi service for tourist use, a re-think of the tourist bus service and regulating the circulation of tourist coaches in the city.

Along these lines, the Councillor for Tourism, Agustí Colom, asserted that “in the same way that cruise ship passengers in transit pay the tourist tax, we want coaches carrying visitors to pay for prior authorisation which allows them to circulate and park in the city”.